Trustees get demonstration of online curriculum

Ruth CampbellMidland Reporter-Telegram

Published 7:00 pm, Tuesday, August 12, 2008

CSCOPE, an online curriculum support system aimed at improving student performance through classroom instruction, is taking hold at Midland ISD. Board members got a review of it at a luncheon meeting Tuesday.

Science is the first subject on which CSCOPE will be tried. The system is being adopted - or considered - by other local districts such as Greenwood and Big Spring.

Ashley Bryant, a Lee High School pre-advanced placement and advanced placement teacher, told trustees the system will help first-year teachers not to feel so "compressed and overwhelmed."

It will also allow teachers to keep up with each other's lesson plans, which will help students when they move to a different teacher in coming years.

With the new curriculum, elementary science coach and former teacher Michelle Allen said the district will be on the "cutting edge" of what needs to be done to retain teachers.

"We're going to be there to walk beside these teachers and help them realize science is a process," said Allen, who has 28 years of teaching experience, three of which are in science at Long Elementary School.

The year before she arrived at Jane Long Elementary School, 27 percent of students passed the science TAKS. The state passing rate is now 75 percent and this year, her students achieved a 90 percent passing rate.

She worked on science curriculum this summer in Austin and said Texas has "raised the bar" on science scores. "It's not coming down. They want to send a message that Texas is going to teach science one way or another," even if passing score has to be set at 100 percent, she said.

Math and Science Director Holly Roberts said CSCOPE is backed by well-known researchers and was developed by Education Service Centers. It allows districts to integrate past work with new material, promotes teacher collaboration and offers clear directives on what instructors are supposed to teach.

A year-at-a-glance component tells teachers when they should teach certain standards and allows for flexibility at the district level. It also is supposed to allow students to focus more on "important standards" in science at each grade level.

"We haven't really had a guide in science telling teachers what they needed to get done," Roberts said. "If teachers didn't take the initiative, it got pushed to the back."

Some of the other science and math initiatives being rolled out this year are:

- Updating science labs. Roberts said there are no labs at the elementary schools and Goddard Junior High has outdated facilities that were not covered in the secondary school bond issue.

- Science coaches at the elementary and secondary levels.

Although teachers spoke of CSCOPE with excitement, Superintendent Sylvester Perez cautioned that its effects will take time. "I don't think it will be a silver bullet," he said, because the elementary science foundation wasn't all that strong. "Our teachers are true lifelong learners and they're risk takers when it comes to our children."

CSCOPE, developed by Texas Education Service Centers and a team of content experts, is a comprehensive, customized, user-friendly curriculum management system built on the most current research-based practices in the field. Its primary focus is to impact instructional practices in the classroom to improve student performance. This system includes three key components operating together: